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2024 ANS Annual Conference
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Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Glass strategy: Hanford’s enhanced waste glass program
The mission of the Department of Energy’s Office of River Protection (ORP) is to complete the safe cleanup of waste resulting from decades of nuclear weapons development. One of the most technologically challenging responsibilities is the safe disposition of approximately 56 million gallons of radioactive waste historically stored in 177 tanks at the Hanford Site in Washington state.
ORP has a clear incentive to reduce the overall mission duration and cost. One pathway is to develop and deploy innovative technical solutions that can advance baseline flow sheets toward higher efficiency operations while reducing identified risks without compromising safety. Vitrification is the baseline process that will convert both high-level and low-level radioactive waste at Hanford into a stable glass waste form for long-term storage and disposal.
Although vitrification is a mature technology, there are key areas where technology can further reduce operational risks, advance baseline processes to maximize waste throughput, and provide the underpinning to enhance operational flexibility; all steps in reducing mission duration and cost.
Takeo Nishitani, Kenji Tobita, Kunihiko Okano, Masayushi Sugimoto, Toshihiko Yamanishi, Roland Heidinger, Angel Ibarra, Noriyoshi Nakajima
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 66 | Number 1 | July-August 2014 | Pages 1-8
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST13-733
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the Broader Approach (BA) activities, cooperated work on the DEMO design is undertaken with the IFERC project team and home teams in the EU and Japan. System code benchmarking to establish the common design tools and the definition of critical design issues have been progressed so far. The BA DEMO design work is focusing on the common critical issues such as divertor design, remote maintenance scheme, and blanket design. In parallel, safety research for the fusion power plant started re-analyses, which include severe events such as total loss of coolant without any electric power. In the DEMO R&D activities, five R&D tasks related to blanket materials and technology are carried out intensively according to the common interests of the EU and Japan for DEMO. A neutron source using the IFMIF/EVEDA prototype accelerator and the IFMIF/EVEDA lithium target test loop is under discussion as one of the major activities after 2017.